What SMEs cannot do without..........

As per the Latest SME Buzz in Economic Times, Top 10 disciplines that SMEs cannot do without include-
1. Customer Relationship Management
Tools that companies use to interact with customers which includes Marketing, Employee training and special purpose CRM software.
2. Knowledge Management Tools
Tools for managing knowledge in organisations for supporting , creation, capture, storage and dissemination of information to enable employees to have ready access to organisation's documented base of facts, sources of information and solutions.
3. Enterprise Resource Planning
Systems which are intended to manage all the information and functions of a business or company from shared data stores.
4. Online Collaboration Tools
5. Information Security
6. Social Networking
7. Payroll management tools
8. Search Engine optimisation
and many more........

237 individuals come together for a noble cause

Early this year, 237 bloggers from the marketing, research and associated streams, from 15 countries across the world decided to partcipate in a collaborative venture called the 'Age of Conversation 2' to raise money for Variety, the children's charity. All proceeds from sales of the book, available in hardcover and softcover editions, as well as a downloadable e-book, will be donated to Variety, the international children’s charity.

My chapter in AOC 2 on "Interactivity in the digital age" talks about improving the interactivity of an online marketing communication tool for better brand communication. The thoughts included in the chapter are based on my research paper: "Improving Corporate Blog Interactivity for increased brand communication" which can be downloaded from the research library at Customerthink-the global thought leader in customer-centric business strategy.

The primary thought behind the book-

The marketing industry is abuzz about how citizen marketers are changing the landscape, and these books capture that new phenomenon from a uniquely global vantage point.

The Age of Conversation 2 is available as a downloadable e-book, at a cost of $12 and a limited number of printed books in hardcover for $29.95, and softcover for$19.95.

Purchases can be made online at lulu.com. More information can be seen online at the Age of Conversation.

Corporate Blogging Series VIII-Driving Consumer Engagement through a corporate blog

General Motors has been using it's Corporate Blog as a marketing tool to change brand perceptions and build consumer engagement.It would be interesting to know how the kind of content posted by an organization drives consumer engagement.

My article on Customerthink
A Troubled General Motors blogs to connect with it's customers
which has been featured under the category CRM, has been created out of findings of research being pursued on a set of corporate blogs to look at content categorization and how content attractiveness can build consumer engagement, which is an integral component of the CRM endeavours of any organization.

The Web 2.0 enterprise and the customer

A McKinsey survey on usage of Web 2.0 tools in organisations has some interesting results.

1.Tools they looked into:Web services, Blogs, RSS, Wikis, Podcasts, Social networking, Peer to Peer and Mashups.

2.Out of the agendas for adoption, focussing on interactions with customers has emerged as an important objective.

3.Adoption of Web 2.0 has changed the way organisations interact with their customers and suppliers.

4.Getting customer participation in product development, improving customer services, customer aquisition and enabling customer interaction were the core utilities of these tools in the ' Interfacing with Customers' category.

5. Adoption of managerial methods to encourage adoption and reduce barriers to these tools made sense in a competitive scenario where adopters of these technologies would end up with a decided competitive edge.

6. While these tools are being used for internal and external communication, usage for co-creation may soon evolve into usage for driving innovation.

The full report-Building the Web 2.0 enterprise

Corporate Blogging Series VI-Indian Corporate Blogs

The latest addition to corporate blogs in India, after Infosys ,Tata Interactive Systems Ltd., Cleartrip.com and Frito Layis the Indian auto giant Mahindra and Mahindra.

Named the Mahindra Universe, the blog revolves around 4 thought processes-
Customer Centricity
Globalisation
Sustainability
Innovation

With respect to Customer Centricity, the blog says-

Mahindra aims for a long-term engagement with its customers and encourages customer loyalty and advocacy by responding to their changing needs and expectations speedily, courteously and effectively. Engaged customers ensure a business of sustained and profitable growth.

With about 30 posts in a 3 month time span, it will be interesting to follow the usage of the blog by the organisation.

Corporate Blogging Series V-8 reasons why organisations should blog.

Andrew Rudin's post at Customerthink raises a pertinent question with respect to an ideal social media tool for salespeople.

My take on this-

Social media is a good tool to track prospects through social networking sites and highlight product benefits. The negative implication obviously lies in this being a short term solution.To work on that, salespeople can team up and form online communities which can also help reduce post purchase dissonance or doubts and at the same time help the organisational customer centric strategies by allowing a peep into the consumer mind through analysis of the member conversations.

My view on the right social media tool for the job is an organisational blog.There are too many shiny new web 2.0 objects,and social networking sites can help form groups faster(so a good short term approach) but i still think that a blog may make more sense.

1.The blog can serve as a virtual brand communication tool and selected salespeople can join hands and benefit from each other's posts and consumer comments.It is easier to update than the organisational website.

2.By posting content relevant to the consumer organisations can give them a reason to revisit the site.

3.A blog post will optimise better on search engines.

4.It will equally serve the purpose of a community.

5.Ownership of an employee contribution on the organisational blog lies with the organisation.

6.Blog audiences appear to be more focussed- so discussions will be more meaningful.

7.The organisation can link back to all consumer evangelists blogging about the organisational products and hence try to reign in the consumer generated media to some degree.

8.The organisation can participate in the online dialogue that consumers or the relevant industry as a whole is involved in.

9.Tracking and monitoring consumer sentiment becomes easier.

As I researched varied types of content on organisational blog posts, I was able to identify at least 25 different types of the same. A factor analysis should help categorise the same into relevant content categories.

Somewhere this appears a more subtle, more relationship marketing way of getting a customer...doesn't it?

The Forbes Business and Financial Blog Network

Last month my mail inbox had an email with the following subject-
Business and Financial Blog Network: an invitation to join: Forbes.com

The text ran something like this-

"You are invited to join the new community of the high quality business and financial bloggers from Forbes.com. Our community, the Business and Financial Blog Network, was launched in March, 2008.We chanced upon your blog in a google search........

The Blog Network’s content will focus on senior business decision makers and high-net-worth investors. Topics will be relevant to the banking, trading, hedge fund management, affluent investing, and senior business decision-making communities. Participation in the network is by invitation only, and all blogs are vetted by Forbes.com editors for appropriate content, and to ensure that they are in keeping with the Forbes editorial brand.
Your blog will be promoted to our roster of blue-chip advertisers and we will only run campaigns that are appropriate for the audience. "

I joined the network and for all those bloggers who would like to do the same, click on the network ads located in the right margin or in the footer and then let forbes take a call....
For those interested in hosting ads on your blogs, look up Google adsense.Google AdSense matches ads to your site's content, and you earn money whenever your visitors click on them.

Happy blogging!!!!

Corporate Blogging Series IV:Content Attractiveness and the Consumer.

Debbie Weil’s post on tools to measure the success of a corporate bloghighlights the usage of Google Analytics to measure statistics, page views, unique visits, time on site, maximum page views and feedburner to track RSS.

She also talks about inbound links to the corporate blog. Technorati rankings make sense, but I still feel that Technorati Authority will be a better measure. The take on comments is relevant, as comments appear to be a better measure of consumer interest than no. of unique page visits and time spent by a user on an exploratory search, who happened to land onto the particular webpage. Though useful from a long term point of view for generating brand impact, of greater interest to an organisation is a somewhat ‘engaged’ user who is significantly emotional about the brand enough to comment on an organisational post. What is more interesting here, than the kind of post which garnered the maximum views is the kind of post which garnered the maximum comments!!

Blogs attempt to change the flow and balance of information and try to shape perceptions by presenting a unified mass market branding image which can be confronted by a counter flow of dissenting opinions, alternative sources of information and messages.It is these opinions which are reflected through the user comments that are significant.

In this context, a user perception survey for content on a corporate blog can help categorise content into different categories. Further, ascertaining no. of comments per post in each category separately and statistically analysing the same can add value to the process of generating accountability for a blog.

Content attractiveness may well hold the key to building consumer engagement through social media.After all, a post responding to a brand related controversy may generate far more consumer interest than one about the organisation's CSR initiatives!!!

Corporate Blogging Series III-Consumer Engagement,Technorati authority and CGM

Research clearly indicates that organisations have accepted 2 facts-
1.Cultivating a respectable level of customer engagement is a strategic challenge.
2.The volumes and degree of consumer engagemnets will have long term implications for a firm.

Let's take a look at social media's role in this entire talk about consumer engagement.

Mario Sundar at the Linkedin Corporate Blog lists the top fifteen corporate blogs on the basis of their technorati authority.

Technorati authority is a measure of the number of blogs linking into the blog under discussion.In other words, technorati authority is indicative of-
1)Popularity of a blog as in terms of voulme of readers.
2)Volume of user generated content about a blog, with those many other users having generated content regarding that particular organisation, brand or product.

For the purpose of this discussion on corporate blogs, let us assume that a significant number of visitors to the blogs in question are customers-prospective and current.

Further, as per Ghuneim’s typology of engagement, a customer who comments on an online organisational initiative measures ‘medium’ on the degree of engagement continuum while a customer who creates content, as in blog about an organisation, brand, product, or service rates as 'highly engaged'.

Hence, the technorati authority can be safely assumed to be indicative of the volume of significantly ENGAGED consumers.The study of CRM could significantly benefit by taking into account the technorati authority of these corporate blogs, to track the volumes of consumer engagement.

Some observations-
1.There is a positive correlation between the reach(percentage of global internet users who visit the site) of a blog(source:Alexa.com) and the Technorati authority of the corporate blog.
2.There is a positive correlation between the Technorati authority of a corporate blog and the volume of Consumer Generated Media(source : Blogpulse).

Engagement refers to the creation of experiences that allow companies to build deeper, more meaningful and sustainable interactions between the company and its customers and appears to be the first step for any corporate towards building consumer loyalty, satisfaction, involvement and evangelism. Social media sure seems to provide a way.

Corporate Blogging Series II: Blogging and the Brand

Perusing through several corporate blogs to understand the objectives behind their existence, customer aquisition and retention appear important thoughts behind the strategic management decision to host the same.

To promote Customer Acquisition by building brand equity by
a)Showcasing organisational growth
b)Clarifying organisational vision, opinion and direction for consumers,
c)Image Building and
d)Brand Building

Acquisition is a vital stage and a focused and contextual interaction with the customers is beneficial to any organization for furthering it's brand. A corporate blog helps create a forum for open and integrated channels of communication between brand and consumer by enabling interactivity between brand and consumer.

Blogging is fast becoming an extremely important strategy for any online marketer.Research shows that organisations after having commenced blogging have climbed up the Alexa traffic rankings. As news articles about a relevant industry, product updates, interviews, insights into topics of importance to the target audience emerge on the blog, they create a subscriber base, the way people subscribe to the daily newspaper. This way regular updates on products, features etc. can reach the niche consumer base at a fast speed. Good quality relevant content, constant updation and creation of a blog environment where ideas flourish and debates on related topics keep people from the target market coming back is what works for these organisations

People who read organizational blogs perceive an organization's relational maintenance strategies as demonstrating more of a conversational human voice than those who read only the organization's traditional Web content or those in a control group who read Web content unrelated to the organization(Kellehar,Miller,2006)

The CISCO Blog is an open discussion forum where Cisco leaders address key technology issues and where community interaction is encouraged. By hosting a blog with the above viewpoint CISCO first built an image of the company as an authority in technology and developed a community to share its ideas.After developing a dignified readership base, by posting entries like “Patent Board: CISCO is #1 Leader in Telecom”, Cisco has managed to create an image of a highly competitive company which is centre-of-the business-universe telecommunications. Also, by featuring excellent reviews from the Fortune, Wired and Financial Times, CISCO has done well to use its blog effectively towards brand promotion!

The corporate blog of Tata Interactive Systems(TIS), gives a peek into the work being done and products being launched by TIS for learning disabilities of children with special educational needs, by showcasing the Tata Learning Disability Forum, Also, by hosting a category 'Life at TIS', TIS shares its organisational culture with the world.

Corporate Social Responsibility Blogs , like those of Mc Donald's and Hewlett Packard are fast catching on. With Mc Donald's discussing issues closer to health, nutrition and food safety , this endeavour contributes to an image building exercise, as a company valuing quality of food provided to the consumers. This is a good effort for a company which has faced a lot of criticism towards promoting unhealthy food habits.

From the perspective of Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, blogging is not an appendage to Sun’s marketing communications strategy today-it is central to it. Blogs have authenticated the Sun brand more than any typical advertising campaign and associated with Sun a respectable degree of tenacity and authenticity.

The Age of Conversation 2.0

‘The Age of Conversation 2.0: Why Don’t People Get It?’ is a collective endeavour of 275 authors, who are going to write on a myriad range of subjects relevant to the social media space, breaking geographical barriers and creating history with respect to the voluminous degree of particpation in an era of virtual collaboration.

A participatory,conversational, creative selection of perspectives from individuals rooted across diverse global locations, should make interesting reading.

A brainchild of Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton, The Age of Conversation which was a collective venture of over a 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators, turned out to be a successful experiment and received a tremendous response, thereby raising money for Variety, the children's charity.

The authors of the the second book-'Age of Conversation 2.0' are-

Adam Crowe, Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob Carlton, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Bradley Spitzer, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Clay Parker Jones, Chris Brown, Colin McKay, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Cord Silverstein, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Goldstein, Dan Schawbel, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Darryl Patterson, Dave Davison, Dave Origano, David Armano, David Bausola, David Berkowitz, David Brazeal, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Emily Reed, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, G. Kofi Annan, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Graham Hill, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, J.C. Hutchins, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeremy Middleton, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, Joe Talbott, John Herrington, John Jantsch, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Flowers, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kris Hoet, Krishna De, Kristin Gorski, Laura Fitton, Laurence Helene Borei, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Barnes-Johnston, Louise Mangan, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Marcus Brown, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Mark McSpadden, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Hawkins, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Monica Wright, Nathan Gilliatt, Nathan Snell, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul Marobella, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Beeker Northam, Rob Mortimer, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Cribbett, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tiffany Kenyon, Tim Brunelle, Tim Buesing, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Longhurst, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

Social media is here to stay

Responses from senior executives across companies in various countries profile an increasing understanding of the use of social media to harness market intelligence and understand consumer perception.(Source:Research done by media company Cymfony)

From Dell to Starbucks:From Ideastorm to My Starbucks Idea

A lot of discussion on organisations using social media as a tool to manage customer relationships has moved around companies using the same for brand visibilty and giving the customers a platform to interact and share, but failing to actually engage customers-as in closing the loop by actually showing the consumer what the company did with those ideas.

Looks like Starbucks was listening-
My Starbucks idea is the response.

As Jeff Jarvis had once rightly said that customers would have conversations about a company, products and services. It hence made more sense for the company to become part of these conversations. A series of branded online communities and corporate blogs followed suite.Starbucks apparently has gone a step forward.By providing a space for consumers to share their thoughts, let others vote on those thoughts and create a point system to rate ideas, it has actually made a concious effort to work on the consumer relationship.

Social media non-believers have screamed in the past about the inability of the medium to clearly showcase what the companies were doing with the consumer feedback or how the same was being leveraged.

This is a case in point!!!!!

Marketers and Wikipedia

As Pete Blackshaw gears up to write about 10 uses of wikipedia for marketers, Some of my thoughts about wikipedia-
1.Positioned as an encyclopedia, it is ostensibly a collaborative directory.So listing a product or brand in this directory makes sense...
2.Since a prerequisite to uploading data on wikipedia is citing references independent of source, the uploaded material automatically gets linked to several other sites and material about the product/brand on the web. It's hence a one stop shop for substantial amount of credible data on your product for a wannabe consumer, and the very fact that it is moderated grants authentication to the same.....
3.Making a brand figure prominently in google searches is obviously a foregone conclusion to why marketers should use wikipedia.....

As he wrote to us on the CGM group, i found his references to Wikipedia as a "trust broker" very interesting. The way the grand masters at wikipedia handle discussions, the level of "transparency", as referred to by Pete is commendable. Further, as the grand masters insist that Wikipedia is not a promotional service, articles on a brand or product eventually are written in an academic fashion.In the process the credibility gained by the brand is unmistakable!!!!

Tagcrowd of my blog

ahuja (8) blogging (43) brand (16) building (14) capital (6) co-creation (6) cocreation (4) collaborative (10) comcast (8) comments (9) communities (19) company (7) consumer (23) corporate (21) council (5) customer (13) develop (4) employee (6) equity (4) experience (4) generated (9) interact (6) interesting (5) knowledge (9) labels (7) leverage (4) links (7) management (6) marketing (11) media (25) networking (8) online (21) organisations (4) participation (8) pm (5) post (18) product (7) relationship (5) resources (5) share (4) site (4) social (24) sunsilk (4) television (6) think (5) tools (9) value (7) vandana (8) videos (4) web (24)

created at TagCrowd.com

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.Saw the same at Pete Blackshaw's blog and thought I should give it a try.

Building Knowledge capital through social media

A lot of discussion has already gone into social media's contribution to building brand/customer equity and as a tool to build networks of relationships/friendships- social capital as it is termed.
However, in this era of knowledge management and elearning, two more dimensions of social media’s contribution cannot be ignored-
1.A tool for building a company’s knowledge capital and
2.A tool for learning.

Organisations have started harnessing collaborative intelligence for learning leading to cognitive involvement of the community members. Research has already proven the positive correlation between interactivity and learning outcomes. Interactivity interfaced with technology not only increases learning effectiveness, but also enhances the knowledge base of the community which includes organizational employees, customers and partners.

Be it the Microsoft Developer Network which hosts a series of employee blogs to share tips on software, programming tips and solutions to programming issues or the GE research blogs, or the Sun Microsystem employee Blogs, the volume of company specific knowledge available on these is huge. Sun Microsystem CEO Jonathan Schwartz uses his blog for product announcements and discussion of new knowledge issues as part of his bid to interact with the community. Think of a layman’s ability to gain access to Sun’s whitepaper on multiplatform virtualisation through his online blog!!!!

The accumulation of this company specific information have also made these blogs/online communities virtual repositories to be tapped whenever required. For that matter, think of the quantum of knowledge that can be retrieved regarding a person’s work in an organisation once he leaves, through his contributions to his blogs etc. The human capital may be dynamic, but the knowledge capital stays with the organisation…

Cocreation through social media

In an era where companies talk about the new form of value creation-Co-creation, where companies are moving away from a company and product centred value creation to an experience centred value creation (Prahlad,Ramaswamy), participation is becoming a desired ingredient. Objectives of co-creation include identifying the right customer set to interact and after identifying the requirements of this customer set, alter product offerings as per requirement of the same.

Some interesting observations from research (Prahlad,Ramaswamy) on Co-creation.
1.In the emerging economic model of value cocreation, consumers and companies routinely collaborate to create personalized value.

2. Cocreation, is not the transfer or outsourcing of activities to customers or a marginal customization of products and services. It isn't scripting or staging of customer events around the company's offerings. Those kinds of company-customer interactions no longer satisfy most consumers today.
IT IS THE CO-CREATION EXPERIENCE(NOT THE OFFERING) THAT IS THE BASIS OF VALUE FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL.

It is hence, this procedure of participation which is important.
Co-creation may require a dedicated approach from the management to allow consumers to not exactly take over the brand, but definitely have a larger voice share. However the high involvement opportunity it offers with substantial value growth drives commitment from organizational leadership.

Kraft's use of co-creation
Consumers co-create 48 products they want to buyis a case in point.

Use of social media to build online communities for consumer engagement to leverage the collective intelligence and experience of the community emerges as a strong option for organisations interested in securing consumer participation...they may also need to focus on the experience they provide through these communities to the participating population.

There are consumers interested in getting involved in every stage of the Product life cycle from concept, through post launch and beyond. The bottomline is-there are passionate groups of involved customers willing to PARTICIPATE. It is upto the organizations to identify them, build relationships with them and leverage the immense power of the participating community for organizational growth.

The Blogging Council

And finally arrives the council for organisations using corporate blogging as a tool for interacting with customers/employees.
Developed as a forum specifically for corporates who blog, members already include-
AccuQuote,Cisco,The Coca-Cola Company,Dell,Gemstar-TV Guide,General Motors,Kaiser Permanente,Microsoft,Nokia,SAP,Starwood Hotels and Resorts,Wells Fargo.

The Blog Council is a community for official corporate blogs and bloggers that represent major global corporations.

Their mission is to address the unique needs of blogging in a corporate environment. It exists as a forum for executives to meet, share tactics and advice, and develop best practices. The Blog Council is here to help create:

Best Practices: Promoting corporate blogging excellence through best practices, standards, and training.
Community: Providing networking and partnering opportunities for leaders of the corporate blogging movement.
ROI: Developing metrics programs that help deliver measurable ROI from blog activities.

Let's hope this emerges as a structured location to understand corporate blogging objectives, outcomes and benefits...Looks like the first place these big corporates have come together to share their corporate blogging activities.

Branded Online Communities move to Television

Branded Online communities, set up by companies for Building brand equity are now tying up with the electronic media for greater visibility. As the interest of the youth increases in social networking, with humongous volumes of youngsters not only hanging around networking sites, but also eagerly participating in consumer communities,these branded online communities have found themselves most wanted on Television.

In a recent developmentin India, Hindustan Unilever's SUNSILK GANG OF GIRLS, an online community , and Zoom Television have come together to present a singing reality show called Sunsilk Gang of Girls - Spotlight Mein.

In response to online applications at the Sunsilk GOG site, this new television series will present four talented girls in the country who will be groomed and mentored by maestros from the music and entertainment fraternity, in preparation for a live finalé performance in front of a big audience.Reality TV, it's success, the impact generated and the huge volume of viewership it draws is not new to us.

As branded online communities embrace Television, the euphoria created by such shows will further increase traffic on the site-increased membership is a foregone conclusion.

Kelly Mooney's thoughts in an ADAGE article on For Relevance, Think Three-Way throw light on how corporates can leverage such situations.By looking at the Brand, the consumer and online communities as three components of a love triangle, she reiterates the need for brands to intersect with online communities, to be able to connect with their consumers.

An excerpt-
"There are no diminishing returns when brands think three-way, when they "triangulate" to communicate in a b-to-we world. Online communities are an infinite resource bringing not only preexisting participants within the brand's range, but new i-citizens formerly uninvolved until their passions are sparked by a marketing campaign or message that inspires them to spread the love."

In Sunsilk's case,the three sides of the triangle are aptly covered- the brand connects to each girl and the fan community; the girls connect to the brand and each other -- all tied to the community or the event as the center.While acting as excellent repositories for information, such communities help the brand marketers by providing information to validate their understanding of the market, while further bifurcating consumers with respect to preferences, expectations, and level of brand loyalty.

The CRM Forum, Mumbai

was invited to conduct a session on 'Social Media and the Customer Relationship' at the CRM Forum organised by Marcus Evans at the Le Meridien, Mumbai, in October,2008. The event was aimed at achieving business excellence through an integration of information, people, policies, processes and technology strategies-effectively executing CRM on its own.

The CRM forum aimed at providing a platform to receive top notch knowledge in capitalising the concepts of CRM, latest trends in customer strategies and technologies, and developing organisation cultures to achieve customer satisfaction , along with advanced applications in the areas of creating a ynergistic partnership between marketing and IT to drive forward CRM initiatives, utilising brand strategies, the media, as wll as data warehousing and data mining.

The event unfolded with an interesting presentation by Dr. G. Shainesh, Associate Professor at the IIM Bangalore, India, where he talked about identifying the consequences of the shift from CRM with technology orientation to a business strategy. This was followed by an interesting case study presented by Mr Gautam Anand, Vice President, ITC Welcom Group on creating outstanding service levels and designing a service design.As several industry experts including Anupam Jalote, Chief Process Officer, Bharti Airtel, Dr. Wolfgang Messner, Director Capegemini shared their experiences, my session on Social Media, and its impact on customer relationships and consumer behaviour was well received.

As I focussed on Corporate Blogging as a potential tool for engagement and reducing the perceived indifference of organisations to consumers, Gaurav Lalla, Director of Internet Marketing,Taj Hotels, Resorts and Palaces emphasised the need of organisations to listen to customers and use the internet as a medium for the purpose.His reference to the utilisation of Second Life as an upcoming medium to conduct brand led dialogues with avatars was interesting.

The event was well attended by delegates from several sectors ranging from Banking and Insurance to hotels, healthcare, retail, telcom and airlines.